Seoul Shakespeare Company will be running a six-week theater workshop that aims to help actors find new ways to interpret the bard’s work.

“We’ve had six-week courses in the past on various topics, but this is our most intensively text-based Shakespeare course,” said Lauren Ash-Morgan, who will be jointly leading the course with fellow SSC member Michael Downey. Last year’s topic was Stanislavski-based and the year before it was archetypes.

“The focus is on developing a methodology for exploring Shakespeare’s text for performance, but the exercises created for each text are physical,” she added.

Ash-Morgan explained that this course was mostly based on David and Rebecca Clark Carey’s “The Shakespeare Workbook and Video: A Practical Course for Actors,” which explores specific speeches to build skills in areas including using language as action, characters’ solving problems through language, and developing skills for adapting one’s text preparation to the demands of different performance spaces and different directors’ concepts.

The company plans to perform “A Winter’s Tale” as its main production next year, which it says is a complex play that would challenge actors.

“(A) skilled performance of Shakespeare requires that the actor be able to utilize all the elements crafted by Shakespeare in the text, and then act the character from moment to moment within what Shakespeare has crafted. This course is designed to give the actor a comprehensive understanding of the tools Shakespeare provides in the text and a methodology for discovering them and bringing them out in performance,” Morgan said.

The course runs on Sundays for six weeks starting Oct. 23.

Visit seoulshakespearecompany.org for further information.



By Paul Kerry (paulkerry@heraldcorp.com)